Word: curcio
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Once an honor student in sociology at the University of Trento, Curcio refused his degree as a symbolic act of defiance in 1969. He moved to Milan and began organizing small revolutionary groups in the city's major factories, then moved on to kidnaping factory executives and shooting government officials. Police captured Curcio in late 1974, but his wife, Margherita Cagol, led a commando raid against the lightly guarded prison and rescued him. Four months later, police closed in on Curcio's wife at a farm where she and some confederates were holding a kidnaped wine merchant...
...though it held him prisoner, the government found it difficult to bring him to trial. In Turin, Curcio and 52 others faced charges of armed insurrection (maximum penalty: life imprisonment). The Red Brigades responded by assassinating a prominent jurist; the trial was thereupon postponed. When the distinguished septuagenarian president of the Turin bar asked to aid in Curcio's defense, he was shot to death near his office. Curcio, who demanded the right to conduct his own defense, declared that the lawyer was a "collaborationist of the regime" and had been "executed." As the Turin trial was rescheduled...
...courtroom, even magistrates, had to undergo five separate security checks. "It would have been a disaster if this trial too had been postponed," said Indro Montanelli, Italy's leading conservative newspaper editor, who was shot four times in the legs by Red Brigades gunmen earlier this month. "Curcio's challenge has to be met even if we must be ready to shed blood...
...trial began with a Curcio lieutenant reading a manifesto that denounced the whole process as a "grotesque spectacle." Curcio himself pointed to the ten impassive black-robed defense attorneys and called them "crows in form and pigs in substance." When the trial reconvened after a four-day recess, he demanded to return to his cell, and the manacled prisoners clanked out of the courtroom...
...trial went on. After a spirited defense effort was made, jurors brought in a guilty verdict for all five defendants. The sentences ranged from 2½ years for the woman to seven for Curcio...